Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

We must believe in free will — we have no choice.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I am a vegetarian for health reasons—the health of the chicken.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I don't invent characters because the Almightly has already invented millions… Just like experts at fingerprints do not create fingerprints but learn how to read them.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise… Because that is how life is — full of surprises.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Even in love, people betray themselves. And when you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself. I would say a great part of human history is a history of self-betrayal and betrayal of others.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Take three quarts of duck's milk...

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I started to "write" even before I knew the alphabet. I would dip a pen in ink and scribble. I also liked to draw — horses, houses, dogs. The Sabbath was an ordeal for me, because it is forbidden to write on that day.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards — or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Not only has our generation lost faith in Providence but also in man himself, in his institutions and often in those who are nearest to him. In their despair a number of those who no longer have confidence in the leadership of our society look up to the writer, the master of words. They hope against hope that the man of talent and sensitivity can perhaps rescue civilization. Maybe there is a spark of the prophet in the artist after all.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I have many times resigned myself to never finding a true way out. But a new hope always emerges telling me that it is not yet too late for all of us to take stock and make a decision. I was brought up to believe in free will.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives — philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet — whom Plato banned from his Republic — may rise up to save us all.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years. It has been revived in our time in a most remarkable, almost miraculous way. Aramaic was certainly a dead language for centuries but then it brought to light the Zohar, a work of mysticism of sublime value.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists — rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka")

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer